Barry Lyndon

I don't know how I slept on this on this film for so long, especially considering Kubrick is one of my favorite directors. An epic, slow moving, three-hour period piece, Barry Lyndon unsurprisingly failed at the box office, and was met with mixed reviews from critics, who praised the visual technique and attention to detail but criticized the film as a whole. I was aware that as time passed critics had warmed to the film more and more, with it landing on a handful of to 100 films lists in the past decade. However, it wasn't until I stumbled across a couple quotes; Scorsese calling it Kubrick's best film and Brain Eno stating that he considered it the greatest film he has ever seen, that I knew I couldn't put off watching it any longer.

Visually the film is gorgeous, achieved in part by Kubrick's revolutionary lighting technique: (From Wikipedia)
Barry Lyndon saw a considerable number of sequences shot "without recourse to electric light."[4] Cinematography was overseen by director of photography John Alcott (who won an Oscar for his work), and is particularly noted for the technical innovations that made some of its most spectacular images possible. To achieve photography without electric lighting "[f]or the many densely furnished interior scenes... meant shooting by candlelight," which is known to be difficult in still photography, "let alone with moving images." Kubrick was "determined not to reproduce the set-bound, artificially lit look of other costume dramas from that time."[4] After "tinker[ing] with different combinations of lenses and film stock," the production got hold of three "super-fast 50mm" F/0.70 lenses "developed by Zeiss for use by NASA in the Apollo moon landings," which Kubrick had discovered in his search for low-light solutions.[4] These super-fast lenses "[w]ith their huge aperture [the film actually features the largest lens aperture in film history] and fixed focal length" were problematic to mount[4], but allowed Kubrick and Alcott to shoot scenes lit with actual candles to an average lighting volume of only three candlepower, "recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age."

The above video is a good example of candle-lit only scene, although I'm not sure if a youtube video really does it justice. Beyond how beautiful the film is, the character arc Kubrick constructs over three hours is masterful, and has more depth than a simple rake clawing his way up in society story, which some people apparently wrote it off as. Anyway, this film is epic, go watch it.